split string without removal of delimiter in python

Question

I need to split a string without removal of delimiter in Python.

Eg:

content = 'This 1 string is very big 2 i need to split it 3 into paragraph wise. 4 But this string 5 not a formated string.'
content = content.split('\s\d\s') 

After this I am getting like this:

This\n
string is very big\n
i need to split it\n
into paragraph wise.\n
But this string\n
not a formated string.

but I want like this way:

This\n
1 string is very big\n
2 i need to split it\n
3 into paragraph wise.\n
4 But this string\n
5 not a formated string

Answer 1

Use regex module provided by python. by re.sub you can find a regex group and replace it with your desired string. \g<0> is used to use the matched group ( in this case the numbers ).

Example:

import re

content = 'This 1 string is very big 2 i need to split it 3 into paragraph wise. 4 But this string 5 not a formated string.'
result = re.sub(r'\s\d\s',r'\n\g<0>',content)

Result would be :

'This\n 1 string is very big\n 2 i need to split it\n 3 into paragraph wise.\n 4 But this string\n 5 not a formated string.'

Here is more in-depth details about re.sub

Answer 2

You could use re.split with forward lookahead:

import re
re.split('\s(?=\d\s)',content)

resulting in:

['This', '1 string is very big', '2 i need to split it', '3 into paragraph wise.', '4 But this string', '5 not a formated string.']

This splits on spaces -- but only those which are immediately followed by a digit then another space.